It’s just a fraction of a cent per viewer. So even with hundreds of millions of viewers it’s still barely a hundred thousand dollars to be split up between all disk throwers.
Every once in a while a Turkish guy shooting with no equipment becomes a meme, or the greatest swimmer or runner in the history of the world comes onto the scene. Newsmedia goes nuts because this sells advertising.
But then a southern girl in a 5-second viral video does 100x of that in notoriety, with no travel budget and for the production cost of a single Big Mac.
Clearly they do or NBC wouldn't pay approximately eleventy quadtrillion dollars every time the contract is up to renew. NBC makes billions on the Olympics though running advertising and advertisers are willing to pay NBC's rates therefore at least enough people care for NBC to profit massively.
They don't want to pay that much, they may not really profit from paying that much, but they can't let their competitors take the customer for free.
Nobody particularly cares, other than other people in the sport. The only reason they might show you is if you win a medal for the US.
They could all save a lot of money and it would probably be more interesting to watch.
Except that the IOC generate billions in revenue so there obviously is value to a lot of people in it somewhere. The problem as stated is that the root source of that value, ie the athletes, see very little of that revenue.
There's value in the Olympics, sure, but that value is concentrated in a handful of big-name sports. The smaller ones come along for the ride rather than generating value themselves.
Support is a two way street, and I'd rather kids grow up to be strong and able to be those supporters of others than end up a depressed lonely loser, when they could've been happy instead, because they pissed their efforts on some trivia.
I found your capitalism quip particularly amusing. I know it's just a parroting of programming from your university days, but I'm sure there's someone in a labour camp in North Korea who'd crack at least a brief smile at the idea of a poor downtrodden Olympian proletarian spending all day practicing throwing a stick because it's their passion.